Dan and Lia Perjovschi - Behind the Line

The international art world discovered Dan Perjovschi in 1999 when his drawings were displayed in the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Under the title rEST, he covered the floor with cartoons and slogans in thick marker pen reflecting on life in Eastern Central Europe since the overthrow of communist rule 10 years earlier. Over time, his cartoons slowly disappeared under the traffic of visitors. But just as Columbus could hardly discover a populated continent, the art world could not discover this Romanian artist. In 1999 Dan Perjovschi had already been active for more than a decade in North America and throughout Europe. Moreover, the techniques of erasure and abjection that brought poignancy to his drawings in Venice were already a key feature of his practice. In Anthroprogramming, made in 1995 in New York, he had laid a loose grid on the walls of the Franklin Furnace artspace and then filled each box with a quick-fire portrait sketch. Once filled, he then spent 10 days systematically erasing the grid and its occupants. In Live! From the Ground, a performance in Chisinau in Moldova in 1998, he crawled prostrate along the city's main street. Addressing the cracked tarmac, he called out Ground to centre! Come in! Come in! I can't hear you like some kind of desperate army telegraph operator. Dan Perjovschi saw this action as a metaphor for life in the communist and post-communist period when Romanian society moved at a crawl unable to tear ourselves off the ground . Witty and sometimes sardonic, the Venice drawings also owed much to his work as a cartoonist for 22, a fiercely independent weekly magazine, the first in Romania after the 1989 Revolution, published in Bucharest, to which he had contributed since the early 1990s. Dan Perjovschi s work in Venice pointed to the disappearance of the East in the face of Western values and the rise of market conditions: it also signalled the rise of a new phenomenon, that of the Eastern European artist, a new exotic species in the fauna of art. In the years since, Dan Perjovschi has drawn commentaries on life in the era of globalisation directly on the walls of many galleries and museums around the world. His thick pen has marked the crisp white surfaces of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2007) and the crystalline walls of the extension to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (2010) designed by Daniel Libeskind. When invited to participate in biennales and other short-term art events, he often works in chalk on the exteriors of buildings or on the paving stones of the street. Lia Perjovschi has lived in two strikingly different information economies. When she began her career, Romania was a world in which too little knowledge circulated. The state exercised a monopoly on what could be written and said. From April 1983, for instance, all typewriters and duplicating machines in Romania had to be registered in the form of a sample page deposited with the police. In this way, anti-regime publicity could be identified and punishment meted out to its authors. Only licensed sentences found their way into print. Even single words carried dangerous, inflammatory associations, according to the censors, and so had to be struck from the manuscripts that passed through their hands. In his essay Censor s Report Norman Manea offers a glossary of these treacherous words, amongst them cold, dark, coffee, breasts and God. For almost two decades Lia Perjovschi has been obsessed with gathering and organising knowledge, light-heartedly describing herself as a real Google.